13 ms·

I'm an author, and I've confirmed that 3 of my books are in the 500K dataset. Thus, I stand to receive about $9,000 as a result of this settlement. I think th

• franze 1y ago
  where can i check if my book was in it?
  • pier25 1y ago
    Maybe here: https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/ https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/
  • simonw 1y ago
    One of the sources is LibGen, you can search that with this tool: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/searc...
• k__ 1y ago
  Cool. Where can I check if I'm eligible?
  • jawns 1y ago
    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-set/682094/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/searc...
    • gabriel666smith 1y ago
      This is a 2025 snapshot of Libgen, rather than the dataset Anthropic trained on, or the 'reduced to 500k books' dataset of books by authors who are deemed legally due some cash from Anthropic because Anthropic downloaded the ebook file.
• visarga 1y ago
  How is it fair? Do you expect 9,000 from Google, Meta, OpenAI, and everyone else? Were your books imitated by AI? Infringement was supposed to imply substantial similarity. Now it is supposed to mean statistical similarity?
  • gruez 1y ago
    >Were your books imitated by AI? Given that books can be imitated by humans with no compensation, this isn't as strong as an argument as you think. Moreover AFAIK the training itself has been ruled legal, so Anthropic could have theoretically bought the book for $20 (or whatever) and be in the clear, which would obviously bring less revenue than the $9k settlement.
    • visarga 1y ago
      Copyright should be about copying rights, not statistical similarities. Similarity vs causal link - a different standard all together.
      • Retric 1y ago
        The entire purpose of training materials is to copy aspects of them. That’s the causal link.
        • Dylan16807 1y ago
          The aspect it's supposed to copy is the statistics of how words work. And in general, when an LLM is able to recreate text that's a training error. Recreating text is not the purpose. Which is not to excuse it happening, but the distinction matters.
          • program_whiz 1y ago
            In training, the model is trained to predict the exact sequence of words of a text. In other words, it is reproducing the text repeatedly for its own trainings. The by-product of this training is that it influences model weights to make the text more likely to be produced by the model -- that is its explicit goal. A perfect model would be able to reproduce the text perfectly (0 loss). Real-world absurd example: A company hires a bunch of workers. They then give them access to millions of books and have the workers reading the books all day. The workers copy the books word by word, but after each word try to guess the next word that will appear. Eventually, they collectively become quite good at guessing the next word given a prompt text, even reproducing large swaths of text almost verbatim. The owner of company Y claims they owe nothing to the book owners, because it doesn't count as reading the book, and any reproduction is "coincidental" (even though this is the explicit task of the readers). They then use these workers to produce works to compete with the authors of the books, which they never paid for. It seems many people feel this is "fair use" when it happens on a computer, but would call it "stealing" if I pirated all the books of JK Rowling to train myself to be a better mimicker of her style. If you feel this is still fair use, then you should agree all books should be free to everyone (as well as art, code, music, and any other training material).
• tartoran 1y ago
  > I think that's fair, considering that two of those books received advances under $20K and never earned out. It may be fair to you but how about other authors? Maybe it's not fair at all to them.
  • jawns 1y ago
    Then they can opt out of the class.
    • gowld 1y ago
      Or the judge can reject the settlement as insufficient, which is what TFA is about.
      • NoahZuniga 1y ago
        That doesn't seem why the judge rejected the settlement. To me it seems like there judge thought that the details weren't worked out enough to tell if its reasonable.
  • terminalshort 1y ago
    Do they sell their books for more than $3000 per copy? In that case it isn't fair. Otherwise they are getting a windfall because of Anthropic's stupidity in not buying the books.
    • paulryanrogers 1y ago
      Some judgements are punitive, to deter future abuse. Otherwise why pay for anything when you can just always steal and pay only what's owed whenever you're caught?
      • terminalshort 1y ago
        Yes, in this particular case the damages are statutory, which means they are specifically punitive and not in compensation to the author. This is why it is definitely not unfair to the author. It is a lucky win for them.
• thayne 1y ago
  How much of that $9000 will go to your publisher?
  • jawns 1y ago
    Remains to be seen, but generally the holder of copyright is the author not the publisher.
    • jonathanstrange 1y ago
      That depends on the publishers and your standing with them. Many publishers want a copyright transfer agreement whereas others are fine with exclusive licensing rights. You can't transfer copyright in some countries (e.g. Germany) but you can in the US.
      • favorited 1y ago
        Even though the US allows copyright assignment, none of the Big Five publishing houses in the US require it as part of a standard book deal, even with first-time authors. If you open any book or ebook to the copyright page, unless it's something like a reference book (which are frequently work-for-hire), it will say some variant of "© Author's Name." Publishers get exclusive print publishing rights for a given market, typically get digital and audio publication rights for the same, and frequently get a handful of other rights like the ability to license it for publication in other markets. But ownership of the work is almost always retained by the author.
      • pclmulqdq 1y ago
        I don't think you should work with a publisher who wants a copyright transfer. It is not part of standard book deals.
        • vidarh 1y ago
          Even exclusive licensing rights very often have limitations to them such as a duration or requirements to keep the license, and people should be vary about working with a publisher who wants exclusive licensing without termination clauses that protects them as well.
• jonplackett 1y ago
  Will you actually get the mo ey or will your publisher finally earn out the advances?
• nextworddev 1y ago
  Fair for you maybe
• shermozle 1y ago
  It's far from fair given that if _I_ breach copyright and get caught, I go to jail, not just pay a fine.
  • decremental 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • dragonwriter 1y ago
      You can, but criminal copyright infringement has narrower scope as well as more stringent standard of proof compared to civil copyright infringement.
    • koolala 1y ago
      Even if you don't pay the exorbitant fines?
      • weird-eye-issue 1y ago
        Technically at that point it would be for something like contempt of court if you had a judgment against you and you just ignored it
  • stevage 1y ago
    What? Who goes to jail over copyright infringement?
    • kg 1y ago
      > Penalties to be applied in cases of criminal copyright infringement (i.e., violations of 17 U.S.C. § 506(a)), are set forth at 18 U.S.C. § 2319. Congress has increased these penalties substantially in recent years, and has broadened the scope of behaviors to which they can apply. See this Manual at 1847. > Statutory penalties are found at 18 U.S.C. § 2319. A defendant, convicted for the first time of violating 17 U.S.C. § 506(a) by the unauthorized reproduction or distribution, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, or 1 or more copyrighted works, with a retail value of more than $2,500 can be imprisoned for up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2319(b), 3571(b)(3). If you broaden it to include DMCA violations you could spend a lot of time in jail. It's even worse in some other countries.
• echelon 1y ago
  > that doesn't necessarily mean that those models are a lasting asset. It remains to be seen, but typically this forms a moat. Other companies can't bring together the investment resources to duplicate the effort and they die. The only reasons why this wouldn't be a moat: 1. Too many investment dollars and companies chasing the same goal, and none of them consolidate. (Non-consolidation feels impractical.) 2. Open source / commoditize-my-complement offerings that devalue foundation models. We have a few of these, but the best still require H100s and they're not building product. I think there's a moat. I think Anthropic is well positioned to capitalize from this.
• gist 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • spinningarrow 1y ago
    > This kind of search could potentially compromise someone's privacy Well this is true
    • gist 1y ago
      Claude didn't interpret the prompt correctly. It could have come to the same conclusion w/o privacy concerns. For example if I asked the same question and the handle was 'boatlover' it could have figured out something to say 'only thing I can say is perhaps this person loves boating or boats or is involved in the marine industry'.
• eschaton 1y ago
  In my opinion, as a class member you should push for two things: 1. Getting the maximum statutory damages for copyright infringement, which would be something like &250,000 per instance of infringement; you can be generous and call their training and reproduction of your works as a single instance, though it’s probably many more than that. 2. An admission of wrongdoing plus withdrawal from the market and permanent deletion of all models trained on infringed works. 3. A perpetual agreement to only train new models on content licensed for such training going forward, with safeguards to prevent wholesale reproduction of works. It’s no less than what they would do if they thought you were infringing their copyrights. It’s only fair that they be subject to the same kind of serious penalties, instead of something they can write off as a slap on the wrist.
• SilasX 1y ago
  Be careful what you wish for. While I'm sure it feels good and validating to have this called copyright infringement, and be compensated, it's a mixed blessing at best. Remember, this also means that your works will owe compensation to anyone you "trained" off of. Once we accept that simply "learning from previous copyrighted works to make new ones" is "infringement", then the onus is on you to establish a clean creation chain, because you'll be vulnerable to the exact same argument, and you will owe compensation to anyone whose work you looked at in learning your craft. This point was made earlier in this blog post: https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2025/04/03/why-training-ai-cant-be-ip-theft/#consequence-of-new-learning-rights-enforcement https://blog.giovanh.com/blog/2025/04/03/why-training-ai-can... HN discussion of the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43663941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43663941
  • brendoelfrendo 1y ago
    It's a good thing that laws can be different for AI training and human consumption. And I think the blog post you linked makes that argument, too, so I'm not sure why you'd contort it into the idea that humans will be compelled to attribute/license information that has inspired them when creating art.
    • SilasX 1y ago
      Right — laws can be arbitrary, and ignore constraints like consistency! It’s just something sane people try to avoid.
      • ch_fr 1y ago
        The inconsistency you're talking about is only based on the premise that LLMs and humans are "basically the same thing and thus should be treated the exact same way in this kind of situation". But I don't really see why that would be the case in the first place. Now don't take me wrong, I'm not saying that a rushed regulatory response is a good thing, it's more about the delivery of your reply. I see those arguments a lot: people smugly saying "Well, YOU too learn from things, how about that? Not so different from the machine huh?" and then continuing the discussion based on that premise, as if we were supposed to accept it as a fact.
• Unai 1y ago
  As I understand, this case is not about training but about illegitimately sourcing the books, so unless you sell your books at $3k per copy, I don't see how it is fair.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• sh1mmer 1y ago
  I’m curious about how you confirmed some things you wrote were in the dataset.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• hsaliak 1y ago
  Might be fair for you, is it fair to JK Rowling?
  • stubish 1y ago
    Yes. JK Rowling can still sue about her work being used for training. This lawsuit is about the illegal downloading of her works.
  • iamsaitam 1y ago
    Does JK Rowling really deserve any fairness? She doesn't seem to think that everyone deserves it
• midnitewarrior 1y ago
  What's more fair is for Anthropic to put 5% of their preferred shares at their most recent valuation into a pool that the authors of these books can make a claim against. For 18 months, any author in this cache of books can claim their ownership and rights to their proportional amount of the shares within all claimants. Perhaps tokenize all of the books and assign proportionally for token count of each publication.
  • xvector 1y ago
    What a ridiculous assertion. They're already getting 100-1000x the value of their books. Truly bloodlust knows no bounds.
    • midnitewarrior 1y ago
      There would be no Claude without training data. None of these authors consented to their works being stolen, and there is no recourse to get their works unstolen. If their works are so insignificant to Claude, just remove them from Claude and retrain. It's that simple. Claude is 100% the product of the works that were stolen, just as much as it is the product of the software developers and investors. All the employees just got a million dollar bonus. The authors spent their entire lives up to the point of publishing each work refining their ideas, investing in education and experiences that allowed them to create their works that were stolen. If the result of that theft is a massive wealth-building AI machine, it makes sense that they should benefit from the ongoing use of their work. Anthropic had a chance at licensing these works the standard way, and chose to skip it. Do you think the consequences of this should be that under court order they receive money that is likely the same or less than they would have negotiated had Anthropic not stolen from them? Why would anyone hesitate to steal other publications if their only punishment is that on the off-chamce they get caught, they have to pay what they would have anyway? That's the ridiculous assertion. > 100-1000x the value of their books They would be getting 5% the value of their books. Claude without those books is nothing. Take all the books away from Claude and you can understand the true value they contributed.
    • freejazz 1y ago
      Lol it's willful infringement which at law entitles them up to $150,000. Calling it "bloodlust" is just so ridiculous as to render you without any actual credibility in this conversation.
• gpm 1y ago
  Just a FYI that it's closer to $6750 (Anthropic pays $9000, but 25% is likely to go to the attorneys - the exact number here is up to the court). Can't help but feel the reporting about $3000/work is going to leave a lot of authors disappointed when they receive ~$2250 even if they'd have been perfectly happy if that was the number they initially saw.
• Suppafly 1y ago
  >I think that's fair, considering that two of those books received advances under $20K and never earned out. Doesn't that mean the money should go to your publisher instead of you?
• motbus3 1y ago
  Who am I to say anything. It is just another opinion. It is not about 9k for your knowledge in that book. Is 9k for taking you out. The faster they are able to grab data and process the less chance you have to make money from your work. The money is irrelevant if we allow them to break the law. They even might pay you 9k for those books, but you might never get anything again because they would have made copyright useless
• suyash 1y ago
  For you might be okay, but there are others who probably are losing way too much money because of what happened. Anthropic need to pay 5x to 10x more, it needs to set a deterrent.
• fsckboy 1y ago
  >Also, while I'm sure that Anthropic has benefited from training its models on this dataset I thought that they didn't use this data for training, the "crime" here was making the copies. >I think that's fair, considering that two of those books received advances under $20K and never earned out. i don't understand your logic here, if they never earned out that means you were already "overpaid" compared to what they were worth in the market. shouldn't fairness mean this extra bonus goes first to cover the unmet earnout?